There has been some talk that the annual COGIC convention (which is in town this week) might move to Atlanta or some other large city following their 100th anniversary in 2007. Well, yesterday the Memphis Business Journal reported that COGIC has reached an agreement with the city to stay here until 2010 at least. I’m sure all the people in the service industry downtown are thrilled… the “saints” are such wonderful hotel guests, great tippers and courteous restaurant customers, considerate drivers, etc.
I’m up early this morning… gotta be outside all day shooting photos of Downtown Memphis for a website project I’m working on. I’ve also been contacted by a French blues magazine (I’d link to it but it’s a new magazine and they don’t have their site ready yet) asking me to snap some pics of Beale Street, the W.C. Handy statue, and anything else I can find that shows off Memphis’ musical heritage. I’ll get that done today as well. It’s not a paid gig but I’m happy to do it because it promotes the city.
A few weeks ago, regular blog reader The Romanian Sensation invited me to join a network called Hi5 and be her friend. I checked it out – it’s sort of a crappy knock-off of MySpace. It has a lot of the same features as far as profiles, friend lists, etc. It also has this feature where you can “Give this person Five” as a form of kudos. There are all kinds of different Fives you can give – Diva Fives, Better Half Fives, Cool Fives, etc. You know, I haven’t heard the expression “gimme five” since Willis and Arnold were on TV. Then again, when you join Hi5 at least you don’t automatically get “Tom” as your friend.
But even though Hi5 appears to be a MySpace clone and not as good, I went ahead and joined up. Heck, it’s free, and it seems to be used a lot in the international community. Maybe I can use it to recruit some new Romanians to live and work in Memphis in the summer of ’07. My page on their site is paulryburn.hi5.com if you want to check it out, although it’s basically the same as my MySpace page but with a lot fewer friends on my list.
I got a new phone last week – the Verizon Wireless XV6700. It’s a Smartphone/Pocket PC with 320×240 color touch screen and slide-out keyboard. It has a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, and pocket editions of the Microsoft office software. It also has built-in Wi-Fi and one-click access to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Now that I’ve had it and used it for a little while, I can report that I love this phone. I’m so glad I got this model and not the more heavily hyped (and more expensive) Treo. Shout out to Dustin at Big Foot for recommending the XV6700. Good call.
Angie A. is going to be furious that I have a better phone than her precious Uber Phone 3000.
All right, I’m off to take some pictures. Look for me downtown with my Hog Hat around 6:00 tonight for the Arkansas-Tennessee game.